Installing 10.6 Snow Leopard Resets your /etc/hosts file

OS X Daily reader Todd Harris has tipped us off that when installing Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, your /etc/hosts file is reset. If you followed a tip we posted a while back about how to block access to specific websites then this is particularly relevant to you, so be sure to manually adjust /etc/hosts again so that the sites you want blocked are reincluded. Of course there are many other uses for /etc/hosts too, so the long story shortened is this: if you have a custom /etc/hosts file, back it up prior to and restore it after you have finished installing 10.6 Snow Leopard! Thanks for the tip Todd!

Enjoy this tip? Subscribe to the OSXDaily newsletter to get more of our great Apple tips, tricks, and important news delivered to your inbox! Enter your email address below:

6 Comments

My hosts file also survived the upgrade or install on multiple machines, but I suspect that’s the key, we upgraded or transferred old systems, which preserved settings like the hosts file. Obviously a clean install that doesn’t include transferring data (users, settings, etc) from an old system will result in a fresh hosts file as well.

My etc/hosts file is unaffected as well. I did an upgrade install, so I assume that’s why nothing changed. Time Machine doesn’t touch etc so if you do a clean install and try to restore that’s probably why its “reset”.

My /etc/hosts file doesn’t seem to affect anything. I’m trying to migrate a web site from one server to another and I set the domain to the new IP for testing and it still points to the old IP. I cleared my cache and tried another browser just